by C. E. Murphy
Table of Contents
Practical Boots
Excerpt: Stone's Throe
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PRACTICAL BOOTS
Copyright © 2021 by C.E. Murphy
All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author, [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover Artist: Indigo Chick Design
This one is for Catherine Sharp, aka 'Sharpie', who gifted me with this cover and got a story in exchange ♥
Practical Boots
A Story of the Torn
C.E. Murphy
Practical Boots
THEY CAME FOR her the moment she stepped into the Waste.
Later she would berate herself for her foolishness. There were reasons to enter the Waste at the same point every time, good reasons, but she should have known that sooner or later, habit would do her wrong.
Later, she could examine her anger at the mistake at her leisure. In the moment, though, she needed to survive.
* * *
Survival defined her, and had for as long as she could remember. Since before the first time she'd been dumped in the Waste beneath the watching gaze of a glittering inhuman court. Then, they had told her they honored her with the opportunity. That she, a half-mortal child, could attain power—could attain legitimacy—by surviving the empty, ruined space between the World and the Torn.
They had left the unspoken part hanging: that children born of both the World and the Torn never did survive this particular honor. That she, like all the others, would die, and leave her father's bloodline to be rebuilt with a woman of the Torn, instead of the World.
Cat had sworn, as the host faded away, that she would survive, and that she would do so with the express purpose of killing the son of a bitch who had fathered her, raised her, and dumped her there.
Driven by that promise, she shaped her first Artifact from the very stuff of the Waste itself. Later, she learned that—in human parlance—the first hit was free. Artifacts, those objects of power so coveted by the people of the Torn, took both power and sacrifice to create. But that was later; the price always came later.
Cat had some ideas about what else it took, but she kept those stuffed down deep in her mind, where 'browsers'—those whose power allowed them to snoop out thoughts—couldn't touch lightly on it, and where their truth couldn't show on her face in an unguarded moment. But those thoughts, like so much else, had come later. Later, where her life always seemed to hang, waiting for her to catch up to it. At the time, she had taken her will to survive and taken the shapelessness of the Waste, and molded them together to build an escape, because nothing could long survive in the shifting space between the World and the Torn. She drew on her need, and on the true threads of ancient stories, and on the bloodline that had, as it turned out, both condemned and saved her.
She fashioned boots from the grey of the Waste, and when she put them on, when she stepped with them, she traveled seven leagues and more.
She traveled into the World, into loudness and brightness and swarms of humanity. Terrified, she stepped back into the Waste and left again at a different angle, desperate to come out elsewhere. Still in the World, but in a place of peace. Meadows, with birdsong and silence and soft wind that ran on forever. There, no distant sound warned her of what she would learn to call cars, or airplanes, or even of the hum of electricity rushing through wires.
The Torn was built of such places, and their peace lied.
Stomach clenched, Cat thought again of the loud place, and stepped backward into it. Vehicles screamed by, kicking up dust and water and making violent wind of their own as voices rose in anger, as flaring red lights washed her vision away, as the scent of machines and too many people assailed her. She reeled, buffeted by the speed and sound of the World her mother had come from, and thought at least she would die here, and not in the Waste.
Someone seized her nape, hauled her backward, pulled her out of traffic. Knocked her on her ass, too, doing it, and stood above her, shouting in panic that rang with worry and relief. Shouting with the kind of care reserved, in the Torn, for the rare children of the Torn, when they had mis-stepped and endangered themselves. An angry care, one born from frightened love.
Not since her very young childhood had anyone shouted at that like Cat, and here, in the first seconds of being in the World, a stranger cared enough to shout at her like her life mattered.
Sitting on the sidewalk with puddles soaking through her trousers and rain dragging hair into her eyes, with all the sound and chaos and mess and mass of humanity around her, sitting in the World mortals had built as the Torn stretched farther and farther away, Cat Sharp looked at her feet and thought: ah. They are practical boots.
The mortal who had pulled her out of traffic rode away on a bicycle through the rain, shaking her head and still swearing at the stupidity of people. Cat, sodden, had risen, pushed wet hair out of her eyes, and, commanding the boots not to step, went into the World to build a place for herself.
It hadn't, in the end, been all that hard. There were couriers, in the Torn. Messengers, servants, underlings whose job involved running information from one place to another. The World had a use for such people as well, and more, the World paid their couriers. Paid handsomely, even, for discretion and speed.
Cat could provide both, with her practical boots.
Most jobs didn't require them. Most jobs involved a bicycle and a reckless abandonment of self-preservation. But once in a while, someone came to her with an item, or a question, or a promise, and for the right price, she delivered those things through the one space that no mortal could follow. Through the Waste.
Through the one place, as it turned out, that her father could find her, if she used the same entrance point time and time and time again.
* * *
Her first instinct, naturally, was to run. One didn't fashion seven-league boots out of the ether if one's base instinct as a living creature was to fight. Cat drew a picture in her mind, hardly more than a sketch of lights and shadows that meant home to her, and stepped.
Except she didn't step. The Waste held her like tacky glue, not quite stopping her, but certainly slowing her down enough that somebody could punch her in the face while she got used to the idea of the power deserting her.
Being punched in the face, though, clarified a few things. Mostly that if flight wasn't going to work, she had better get down to the hard task of fighting. Just like everything else, the why of it not working could be figured out later.
Good news was, there weren't very many of them. Nobody from the Torn wanted to spend time in the Waste if they could help it, so the task force sent to fetch her was made up of a mere half-dozen people, one of whom had just punched her in the face, making them the obvious first target.
Bad news was, she only had one hand to fight with. She hadn't planned to be in the Waste for more than a few seconds; hadn't planned for her delivery to take more than a few minutes. Putting her courier's backpack on, under those circumstances, hadn't seemed worth the effort.
That had been then, though. This was later, when the price always came due.
She couldn't put the pack down. Things put down in the Waste tended to disappear forever. Cat didn't know
what she was carrying, but she did know the money waiting for her on the other end was very, very good, and it would be a real shame to explain it had gotten lost. Plus it would wreak havoc on her courier rating.
So she grabbed her opponent's shirt with one fist, pulled her close, and slammed her knee up into her crotch. The woman paled, shock slowing her enough that Cat had time to seize the back of her neck and bring her face down on Cat's rising knee. Bone crunched and blood squirted as Cat shoved her unresisting assailant backward and forgot about her for a while.
Two of the remaining five looked surprised, as if they hadn't expected any resistance. They clearly hadn't been briefed, or hadn't believed the briefing.
Cat felt quite strongly that anybody who hadn't believed the briefing on her deserved what was coming to them. But they weren't the real problem. There were two others, farther back in the grey nothingness of the Waste, who were obviously not there to collect her. They were there to protect the sixth and final member of the team, who stood as far away from the fight as he could, an expression of quiet intensity sharpening his pretty features. Power washed off him, distorting the grey as magic responded to his will. Something glimmered in the grey, soap-bubble-like, and in a heartbeat, Cat understood.
He was obviously an Artificer, like herself. But his Artifact was a privacy bubble, or something of that nature. Something designed to keep things both in and out. That skill would be considered of great value in the Torn, where ‘browsers’ could casually pluck your thoughts out of your mind, or hear a whisper spoken a thousand feet away. Here, in the Waste, its use was in keeping her in. As long as he maintained the bubble, Cat wasn't going anywhere.
Out of curiosity, she pulled the gun from the back of her waistband and shot it at the rippling wall.
The steel-cased bullet slammed through the Artificer's magic, tearing a hole in it as surely as it would tear a hole in flesh. The Artificer's raw scream would have softened Cat's heart toward him, under different circumstances. Iron disrupting magic was never easy, even if she'd spent years adapting to it. This Artificer hadn't, and—watching him collapse, clutching his head and wailing—Cat reckoned he'd be weeks, if not months, in the recovering.
His two bodyguards went through a complicated series of twitches while they decided which was more important: comforting the Artificer, or punishing Cat for her misdeeds. They finally split the difference, one dropping to her knees beside the Artificer and the other running full-bore down on Cat.
Of the two who had been closer to Cat in the first place, one lunged at her with the same intensity the bodyguard was coming at her with. The other one, obviously much, much smarter, backed the hell off, his hands raised and his face pale, even in the weird lightless grey of the Waste.
"You," Cat said to him, with an approving nod as she finally slung her backpack over her shoulders. "You, I like. In so far as I like anything about this situation, I like you. Brains of the outfit, what hey? Right. See, this is what you're avoiding."
His partner reached her right about then, attacking bare-handed, which, all things considered, was a little insulting. Cat stepped under his roundhouse punch, catching his arm on the way past, dragged it a direction it wasn't meant to go, and slammed the butt of her pistol into his temple.
It would have dropped him anyway, but Cat carried steel weaponry for a reason. Blood and bruising bloomed instantly where the butt had struck him, but more alarming was the black ooze that appeared, as if corruption had slipped from the gun straight into his skin.
Which wasn't far from the truth, really. He'd be fine, if he got back to the Torn quickly enough, but iron alloys didn't play well with Torn physiology. Cold iron—which sounded sexy and cool, but really only meant iron that hadn't been worked with another metal—was even harder on the Torn.
Those like Cat, half of the Torn and half of the World, could use magic and iron, without suffering—exactly—for either.
The other Artificer's bodyguard acquired a modicum of wisdom and pulled up, suddenly cautious about Cat's weaponry.
That was all the time she needed. She stepped.
And came out in the wrong place entirely.
* * *
She knew the man waiting for her. Of course she did. He'd fathered her, although claiming he'd raised her stretched the term beyond its legal limits. He looked as he always had: angular of face, with thick red hair swept back in braids; tall and surprisingly broad of shoulder for his kind, and dressed so immaculately that lint would never dream of forming in his pockets.
He had a speech planned. Cat recognized it in his stance, in the curl of his lip, in the disapproving look down his aquiline nose, and in the way he drew breath like once he began speaking, he would never stop.
She was quite, quite sure that he hadn't intended to begin the lecture with a recoil as his slim-fingered hand rose to his chest in legitimate distress. "What are you wearing?"
Cat glanced down at herself, as if her clothes might have changed in the Waste. They hadn't: she still wore her shit-stomping practical boots that laced up to the knees, the hip-riding leather pants, and the black leather coat that managed a motorcycle jacket vibe while also being long enough to cover her butt.
She thought of the rest of her clothes as accessories. Her shirts varied in cut from day to day, ranging from belly-baring crop-top to 'at least I remembered to put a bra on'. Today was one of the latter. She usually wore heavy-duty biker gloves that saved her wrists a lot of aching when she did courier runs. She still held her gun, and carried other weapons in various places, including the boots. And there was the black leather backpack, of course, carrying its time-sensitive cargo. She didn't know what it was, but she did know that the faster she delivered it, the bigger her bonus would be. That was the only reason to go through the Waste in the first place.
Which meant her father was cutting into her bottom line. Before she could come up with an answer to his self-evident question, he added, "And what have you done to your hair," which sent a satisfied thrill of glee through Cat's gut. Her father's vanity about his hair, the one trait that marked Cat most obviously his as child, was legendary. Hers was as thick as his, and as darkly red, and if he'd loved anything about her, it had been her hair.
"I cut it," she said, almost happily. "With a knife." That was true, as far as it went. She'd also gotten one of those pairs of weirdly-toothed hairdresser scissors that thinned hair by only cutting some of it, and applied it savagely to the blunt, half-shaved cut she'd given herself.
Her father actually blanched, which was about the best reunion Cat could have imagined. "Nice catching up. See you around." She turned away, virtually certain her magic wouldn't come when called.
At least she wasn't disappointed. Whatever pocket of the Torn he'd brought her to, for the moment, he reigned supreme in it. Her name, spoken in his thin, icy tones, raised the hairs on her arms. Cat made sure to fix an unimpressed sneer on her face as she looked back at him.
"What you carry is rightfully mine."
Cat glanced at the strap of her backpack, as if she could see the package through it. "That seems profoundly unlikely."
"And yet. Give it to me, and I will release you."
"That also sounds profoundly unlikely." One heartbeat. Two. She couldn't stand it. "What am I carrying?"
Irritation flashed over her father's narrow features. As if they had any other resting state. Bitchy Elf Face. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning at the thought. The denizens of the Torn came in all kinds of fantastic shapes, sizes, and races, and those of her father's particular heritage did not think of themselves as elfin. Not the way humans thought of them, anyway. They would tolerate aelfen, a word that involved vowels like the Welsh had invented it, as if the extra letters made the same sound superior, but in the modern World's vernacular, Cat didn't have a better word for that half of her heritage. They were tall, thin, immortal, and had pointed ears that she, thankfully, had not inherited. 'Elves' would do, as a name. While she amuse
d herself with that, her father came to a decision that clearly didn't lighten his ill humor any.
"You carry a child."
"I what?" For an instant the phrasing came up all wrong in her mind. Cat was absolutely, definitely not carrying a child. For one thing, she took drugs to keep that from happening, and for another, she was on her damn period right now, which didn't mean she wasn't pregnant, but was a sign in the right direction, and besides, it was at least her second period since she'd last had sex and—
—and that wasn't what he meant. At all. Cat shifted her backpack off one shoulder so she could actually see the carrying compartment, and sort of shook it at her father. "You mean there's an embryo in this thing? No wonder they're paying good money for fast transportation. Anyway, it's obviously not yours."
"But it is, and if you will give it to me, you will receive both the payment you expect and my promise that I will never again cross paths with you."
The promise of that promise slid through Cat's chest like a blade of light. Along it lay a path of freedom, of never looking over her shoulder again, of never second-guessing her journeys through the Waste. It stung with its brightness, almost blinding her, and tasted so sweet that she moved a step forward without meaning to. Only a step: the boots couldn't yet take her from this corner of the Torn.
Only a step, which jolted her back into herself, reminded her that even blades of light had cutting edges. Her throat seemed to taste of the raw flavor of blood, like she'd been screaming, when she spoke. "Are you the person who paid me to make this journey?"
Anger sizzled through her father's eyes. "No. But I will pay the fee for taking it, none-the-less."
"Nope." The word rasped. "Nope. Sorry. No can do. Somebody else offered me a contract for this delivery. I'm not giving it up for you. I'm not giving anything else up for you." She had to leave. That was her exit line: quippy, cutting, confident. She had to leave now.
